History Of Editing

History Of Editing:

Eadweard Muybridge

Was an inventor, photographer and a filming maker born in 1830 England.

To help settle an argument, former Californian Governor Leland Stanford contacted Muybridge due to his reputation as a photographer. The debate revolved around the fact that all 4 hooves of a horse move of the ground when running. The Governor believed that horses did in fact do so, however it was impossible for him to judge due to how humans view moving objects. In 1872 Eadweard played around with 12 cameras in a row which a series of tripwires, when the horse crossed a tripwire a shot was taken which when put together showed a horse galloping in sequence. The first test gave some viability to the Governor hypothesis but the process was not perfected. Between the years 1878-1884 he managed to perfect the method and thus created the zoopraxiscope to show of the motion in his photographs. Here is the orignal movement of the horse:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IEqccPhsqgA
He then repeated his process for other creatures and objects to create movement.

This created the idea of frames per second and started to use 12 frames per second to create the horse, creating the illusion of movement. Presently the known format used is 24 frames per second which makes the movement more believable. A famous movies that moved the camera and kept the person/actor still was the Matrix and the technique is known  as "bullet time"

Auguste and Louis Lumière

The french brothers are credited to be the first film makers in history and created the patent of Cinematograph which allowed big groups (known as parties) to view the footage at once, just like a modern day cinema. They put the films into a roll and used pegs to move the footage at 24 fps with a rotating shutter to create the first cinema to record a strip of film. Although they moved at 24fps it could only film in 18 fps. Once the kit was designed the brothers would film everyday activities and show anyone and everyone. Due to this being new everyone was amazed and would be excited every time they saw a movie. A famous example of this is the footage of a train coming into the station:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1dgLEDdFddk
Because this was the first time any one had saw moving footage they thought the train was coming towards them were scared as they watched in anticipation. All of their movies lasted on average 40 seconds long and were of basic movements and nothing over the top and fancy, like films produced today.

Thomas Edison:

Thomas also created a camera ( the Kinetroph), and set up a patent for the camera, he also set up patents which founded modern day Hollywood. He had a patent similar to the french brothers however only one person could view the Kinetroph/peep show. The peep show was put in penny arcades and allowed one person to watch short films.

Iwan Serrurier

In order to edit in the early days you would cut up film in the light, using scissors to create clips. The clips would then be put together with tape and put together and rested on the metal bins. As clips were stored in bins and not folders and helped found the techniques today.

 Iwan invented a machine to cut film and put the film in spools. This was called a Moviola stenbeck. The company still produces editing machines today. 5-7 years ago this was how films were cut as film on film, 35mm lens are often still used by some film makers.